Welcome to Maggie Gyllenhaal Online the ultimate fansite for the academy award nominated actress Maggie Gyllenhaal. You might know Maggie from movies such as Secretary, SherryBaby, The Dark Knight, Nanny McPhee Returns or Crazy Heart You will also be able to see Maggie in the upcoming movie HysteriaMaggie Gyllenhaal Online brings you all the latest news, pictures, videos and everything else related to Maggie and her career.

The first image has been released for Lenny Abrahamson’s rock comedy Frank. The film stars Domhnall Gleeson (Dredd) as man “who discovers he’s bitten off more than he can chew when he joins a band of eccentric pop musicians led by the mysterious and enigmatic Frank (Michael Fassbender) and his terrifying sidekick Clara (Maggie Gyllenhaal).” The film is based off the memoir by Jon Ronson (The Men Who Stare at Goats), and “is loosely based on Frank Sidebottom, the persona of cult musician and comedy legend Chris Sievey, as well as outsider musicians like Daniel Johnston and Captain Beefheart.” As you can see from the image, Fassbender looks like he’s really gotten in shape for the film, and that shape is terrifying.

Well, you can put this on our list of movies we’ll be keeping an eye out in 2013. A comedic rock biopic starring Michael Fassbender and two of this year’s scene stealers Domnhall Gleeson (“Anna Karenina“) and Scoot McNairy (“Killing Them Softly,” “Argo“)? Yeah, sign us up. And it looks like one more solid name is joining “Frank” as cameras are set to begin rolling soon.

Maggie Gyllenhaal has boarded the film that find her getting a little bit rock ‘n’ roll. The Brit List script, penned by Peter Straughan and journalist Jon Ronson (“The Men Who Stare At Goats“), is loosely based around the life of Chris Sievey, an English musician and comedian who formed the band The Freshies and later performed as the character Frank Sidebottom. No word yet on who will be playing what, but we’re mostly excited to see Fassbender exercise some comedic muscles, and like we said, the supporting cast is ace.

Lenny Abrahamson (“What Richard Did“) will direct, and lensing is slated to take place in early 2013 in New Mexico.

A maverick in the world of movies, Maggie Gyllenhaal has always been at her luminous best in risque roles. And they really don’t come much more risque than her latest. She talks to Tom Shone

THE other week, Maggie Gyllenhaal went on a chat show, her first since giving birth to her second daughter. “I was much more myself than I usually allow myself to be,” she says. “There was no way I was going to be perfect or be totally witty and on it, and I wasn’t. My head was milky.

“I just went and did my job and talked about the movie and went home to my baby.”

But that is the appeal of Maggie Gyllenhaal. With her heart-shaped face, blue eyes and Cupid’s-bow lips, she has the looks of a cutie-pie from the 1920s — a Clara Bow or a Claudette Colbert. But on screen she plays women with jobs and children and bad boyfriends and bra-strap marks. She is as real as a blush, or a bruise, with the same “quality of flushed transparency” that the critic Pauline Kael saw in Debra Winger, whether playing the single mother who falls for Jeff Bridges’ booze-hound singer in Crazy Heart or Batman’s lost love in a Barbara Stanwyck-style bias-cut dress in The Dark Knight.

We are sitting in the window of a cafe in New York not far from where she lives with her husband, the actor Peter Sarsgaard. The Beatles are playing. The waiter — bewhiskered and waistcoated in best Brooklyn-hipster fashion — has just delivered two cups of coffee to our table.

“She has this authenticity, this accessibility,” says Tanya Wexler, the director of Gyllenhaal’s latest film, Hysteria, a jolly romp about the invention of the vibrator in Victorian England. In it, Gyllenhaal plays Charlotte Dalrymple, a knock-’em-dead suffragette whose father helps develop a treatment for ‘hysteria’, which involves inducing orgasm — or ‘paroxysm’ as everyone demurely calls it — in his women patients.

It may sound far-fetched, but this actually happened. “It’s shocking, and it’s funny,” says Gyllenhaal. “Women would go to the doctor and the doctor would give them an orgasm as a cure for hysteria, which was this kind of catch-all diagnosis for women in the Victorian era.” Symptoms included irritability, insomnia, sexual desire and a loss of appetite. “Probably an orgasm would help, but probably not from your doctor.”

Gyllenhaal has a high old time in the role, slamming doors and arguing with patriarchs of the medical establishment, shaming them by virtue of her own ruddy-cheeked vivacity.

“I always knew that Charlotte had to be played by a woman women love,” says Wexler. “I thought, ‘Who is Katharine Hepburn now?’ There are very few actresses who have that strength and that mettle. You know, the girl who can’t help but raise her hand in class, even though the boys are going to make fun of her. Maggie is so that. A pure beating heart.”

In person, Gyllenhaal is warm, clearly very bright and — above all — relaxed, with a dulcet, sandy voice and the low centre of gravity of someone entirely comfortable in her own skin, which may explain her ease in slipping into others’. She spoke in an English accent for the entire Hysteria shoot. (She has mastered an English accent before, for Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang, in which she played a harried mother opposite Emma Thompson’s magical nanny.) One crew member was shocked when she broke out in an American accent once filming was over: “She’s American?”

While filming, she would watch herself on the video monitor — a habit she’d picked up off Jeff Bridges during the making of Crazy Heart. “And I thought, ‘Wow, I’m a woman in this movie. I’m actually a grown-up woman.’ It was the first time I’d ever really felt that. Not a half-woman, half-girl mixture. I felt really proud. I was just about to turn 33. So when she says, ‘I’m a woman like any other,’ [to Hugh Dancy in the film's climactic courtroom scene] I could see, looking at the monitor for that second, what a complicated thing that is to be.”

The realisation is attributable, in part, to the arrival of Ramona, five, and Gloria, seven weeks, but also to the realignment of Gyllenhaal’s relationship with her own parents. They divorced three years ago after 31 years of marriage. “Obviously divorce is hard and really horrible but my mother and father have both opened and blossomed in these different ways,” she says.

Both parents are in showbusiness: her mother is a screenwriter who recently directed her first film, her father a director-turned-academic who lectures at Columbia University. Hers was a “loud, noisy, somewhat chaotic” New York upbringing with lots of parties and the occasional star in attendance — her brother Jake’s godfather was Paul Newman.

Actress Maggie Gyllenhaal may be best known for playing Bruce Wayne’s love interest in “The Dark Knight” or earning an Oscar nomination for her role in “Crazy Heart.” But the Columbia-educated Gyllenhaal — recently dubbed “the ultimate hipster actress” by syndicated columnist Naomi Schaefer Riley — is also known for her social activism, including a stint as host of the PBS documentary series “Independent Lens.”

In her new film “Won’t Back Down,” Gyllenhaal plays a mother who fights to improve the public school her daughter attends. The plot of “Won’t Back Down” centers on parents and teachers teaming up to take over a failing school by invoking a “trigger law.” Although that particular circumstance has not played out fully anywhere in the U.S., some grass-roots parents’ groups in places like California are attempting to invoke trigger laws and seize control of failing schools.

“Won’t Back Down” will be released Sept. 28, and the film’s trailer is playing in theaters. Gyllenhaal recently spoke with the Deseret News about her passion for education issues.

Deseret News: In the context of “Won’t Back Down,” what are your thoughts about public education in America?

Maggie Gyllenhaal: I think if you live in a democracy, which we do, that it’s incredibly important to have an educated electorate. Because otherwise, how do you choose your leaders? It ends up being based on the sort of feeling they give you, or what their hair looks like, as opposed to really taking the time to think about and analyze their policies. And of course whoever our leaders are is so incredibly important.

I’ve always thought even before I had kids, which I do now, that education was a fundamental part of having a functional democracy and really important. What I’ve been learning is that in many, many, many places in this country, it isn’t working in the way that it needs to be.

DN: You mention your kids. (Gyllenhaal and her husband have two daughters, ages 5 years and 5 months, respectively.) How has having kids affected the way you’ve looked at education?

MG: Before I had children, it was all theoretical — or it was about my education or the way that I had been educated, and the things that worked for me and didn’t. And now I’ve got children around me all the time and I see their little minds and how they work and how easy it is to engage them, and then sometimes how incredibly difficult it is and how it takes somebody who is really trained as an excellent teacher to help. I guess the simple answer is, it’s just not theoretical anymore. I’ve got my heart in it, as opposed to just my brain.

DN: How relevant do you think “Won’t Back Down” is to ongoing efforts at reforming and improving public education?

MG: I guess for me the movie is a little bit like a fairy tale. It’s not ultra realistic in style or even in terms of the story that it tells. It’s meant to inspire; it’s meant to inspire a conversation. I don’t think it’s necessarily meant to be a model of exactly how to change the educational system. But I think it’s meant to be about the real truth that we can change things — that one person, two people can really change. I think it is our responsibility when we see things going on in our community and our lives that we believe are fundamentally not right, or not functioning in the way that they ought to be, to try to do something about it.

And sometimes it feels like too much and it feels like we’ve got all these other things going on in our lives or it feels like we’re never going to be able to make a difference, and I think part of what this movie is saying is, “You can.” It’s not just these kind of superhero people. It can be anyone — and it’s people who are really flawed just like we are, who aren’t perfect parents.

DN: What are some of the questions do you hope people will be asking each other after they’ve seen this film?

MG: A couple things. One is, “Are you satisfied with the way your children are being educated?” And then — because basically it’s always going to be a class issue on some level, some people who are going to be able to pay to educate their kids, or they’re going to be able to live in districts that are much better funded — the question after that is, “Are you satisfied with the way that most children in America are being educated, and what could you do about it even if you’re okay with the way your kid is being educated? What kind of responsibility do you feel like you have to change it?”

Maggie Gyllenhaal is most comfortable playing complicated, flawed women, whether in her break-out role in the dark sex comedy “Secretary” or even reprising the part of Rachel Dawes in “The Dark Knight.” So when she was asked to play the determined single mother willing to take on the public school bureaucracy in “Won’t Back Down,” she was up for it only if she could make the character human and relatable.

“I didn’t want to tell the story of someone who does something heroic, who is immediately identifiable as an exceptional, remarkable, heroic person when she starts,” said Gyllenhaal, who turns the role of single mother Jamie Fitzpatrick into a harried, disorganized woman who often has time only to feed her daughter pop tarts for breakfast before rushing her off to school. “I wanted many people to be able to relate to the possibility of doing something heroic. I also wanted her to be really flawed as a mother, and by that I mean like any other mother, trying to manage as best she can, making mistakes, sometimes being able to think about them and sometimes not.”

Playing such a character required a lot of conversations with Daniel Barnz, the co-writer and director, throughout the film’s 10-week shoot in Pittsburgh.

“It’s funny how everyone gets concerned when you are playing a heroine in a big movie that you be really relatable and likable,” said Gyllenhaal, who is just returning to work after her second maternity leave. “All the way through, it was a fine line to walk.”

Gyllenhaal stars opposite Viola Davis, who plays a beleaguered teacher at the same elementary school that Gyllenhaal’s character’s daughter attends. Together, the two women must go up against a resistant faculty, a resigned group of parents and an entrenched school board to take over the failing institution. Though the film isn’t based on any one true story, poor-performing schools around the country are experiencing similar public advocacy.

Set to bow on Sept. 28, “Won’t Back Down” is reminiscent of such populist, issue-driven films as the Julia Roberts-starrer “Erin Brockovich” and the 1979 Oscar winner “Norma Rae.” Gyllenhaal recognizes that although the issues on this one are different, the same challenges remain: “In this movie, you had to find the emotional life within the politics.”

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